Emma Watson UN Feminism Speech

What Feminism Means For Men In 2014

On the other side, a depressing number of men have decided that all the advantages of Twitter — ease of use, accessibility, a public forum — are best used for threatening women who speak out, express an opinion, or do anything other than quietly agree with you. In the last couple of years, everyone from Labour MP Stella Creasy to cheery TV Classicist Mary Beard have been on the receiving end of the kind of abuse that would see the perpetrators either arrested or beaten senseless if they voiced it in public.

The few times that these cases have made it to court the individuals in question have generally turned out to be absolutely pitiful characters. But they’re the extreme end of a long continuum which a lot of young men feel they need to exist on and which, as Watson’s speech pointed out, is doing men no good whatsoever. A lot of inequality doesn’t necessarily stem from men who loathe women — as Finchy memorably said in The Office, ‘How can I hate them when my mum’s one?’ — but it does seem to come from men who are all at sea in a culture of foghorn-volume ‘banter’, exhausting one-upmanship, teeth-grinding online personas, and the never-ending quest for micro-celebrity. A world that encourages everyone to be an always-on-duty, target-smashing, selfie-taking, pumped-up tweet-machine, while ignoring the reality that more and more young men are barely employable, have lower educational prospects than their fathers, and are growing up in a culture where suicide is the biggest killer of men under 50 and could desperately do with some help.

This isn’t to ask for sympathy for the kind of impotent pond-life who tweets a bomb threat to a famous woman because he’s angry with his own mum. The police can deal with them (and Twitter can do a lot more to help crack down on these kind of imbeciles). But Watson’s main point — that gender equality can improve the lives of men as much as women ­— is a massively important one. The debate over feminism doesn’t have to be surrendered to a small circle of academics picking holes in each other, or to the kind of morons who waste their lives watching pick up artist videos and hunting for conspiracies about computer games. Most young people don’t fall into either of those camps and have got a huge amount to offer each other. ‘If we stop defining each other by what we are not and start defining ourselves by what we are — we can all be freer and this is what HeForShe is about. It’s about freedom‘ said Watson. It’s not a massively complicated point, but it’s a significant one. And if it takes a fictional child witch to point it out, then so be it.

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